...
And you are the very last person who should be letting yourself off the hook. This business is just tripe. It is a fact that being too hard on yourself for your transgressions is nothing whatever other than letting yourself off the hook... with a righteous-sounding excuse. Fuck you.
Max also does a totally shitty and damn insincere job of confessing the nature of that for which he has forgiven himself here. Total load of crap. It sounds damn humble and positive, though, now doesn't it? It's horse shit. And, darn, he's threatening to stop his weekly self-love-fest. Oh, boo-hoo-hoo-hoo! We'll have to stop listening to how the world would be saved if only people were more like him... feigning selflessness and mutual respect.
No!
You can't go on about selflessness while forgiving yourself for your selfishness! You transgressed. You cop to it in front of those against whom you transgressed, tell them you are sorry and that you will work hard to deserve their forgiveness. That is what lets you move forward. And if it is no longer possible to make a clean breast of it with the people you harmed, you confess it to others anyway, and then you do better or you are just flat out not sorry. Max isn't sorry. Max wants you to like him, think he's saving the world, and to be moved to support him either financially or morally, and that way he can keep up the ruse amicably enough to make it out of here relatively unscathed.
Let us learn to be honest at least with ourselves if we cannot muster it for the world at large.
All this crap about having to love yourself before you can love anyone else is also hogwash. If you don't love yourself your love for others might better be termed "need" or you really do love others and aren't wasting time nursing a self to push on them one way or the other. The whole problem is people attending to this self crap.
I do grant that a sick ego is incapable of dropping such that it does not cause more trouble than leaving it alone. I believe this very point is why Michael Tsarion has inverted the "you do not exist" part of the Zen canon, and is trying to reach people through the door on the other end of the building, but the whole thing hinges on you realizing that you are, in fact, a fig newton of your own imagination.
You can't love anyone until you have that straight.
You can't respect anyone until you have that straight.
Whatever it is you are only calling "love" and "respect" right now isn't either one until you have that straight.
The imperative is that you stop giving yourself excuses not to do better, not to rise.
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